The opening act in Dexter’s final season is an episode called A Beautiful Day, and if you detect a note of irony there, you’re not far wrong.

Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter play television’s most emotionally tortured brother-sister couple, and last season ended — spoiler alert, for those who are months behind in their Dexter viewing — with ambitious, overachieving detective Debra Morgan discovering her vigilante-murderer brother Dexter in the act, as it were, of silencing a witness to his many misdeeds. His fateful last words to her, as she trained a gun on him, overwhelmed by the scope of what he’d done, were “Do what you gotta do.”

Michael C. Hall, left, and Jadon Wells

The new season opens with an idyllic father-and-son moment, Dexter flying a kite with his now-toddler son Harrison (Jadon Wells) on a windswept hill, with Dexter’s familiar, oddly toneless voice-over, saying, “There’s nothing like a crisis to help define who you are.”

It’s six months later, and all seems well in Dexter Morgan’s life. He’s coaching a kids’ soccer team; he has his bowling team back together, made some new friends, and is finally ready to admit to himself that he’s a survivor.

Dexter

The good times last all of seven minutes of Dexter’s opening hour. Charlotte Rampling, one of the finest actresses of her generation — her first screen appearance was in Beatles filmmaker Richard Lester’s The Knack… and How to Get It, in 1965 — appears as neuropsychiatrist and famed criminal profiler Dr. Evelyn Vogel, newly assigned to Miami’s police department to help them deconstruct the mind behind the still unsolved “Bay Harbor Butcher” murders. Dexter fans know the plot by now, and at first glance Dr. Vogel is just the latest in a long line of criminal profilers who’ve matched wits with Dexter Morgan, and lost every time.

Michael C. Hall

This time is different, though, and not just because this is Dexter’s last season. As played by Rampling, Dr. Vogel seems to know a lot more than she’s letting on. She’s calm, reflective and observant, not given to making snap judgments. When Dexter says, half-jokingly, at a particularly grisly crime scene that “People are crazy,” she sees the double meaning in a heartbeat.

Dexter

Dexter is consummately well acted, not just by its lead actor, perennial Emmy nominee Hall, but by one of television’s most competent, proficient cast ensembles. Hall is always good, but the revelation in Dexter’s season opener is Carpenter, as his slowly spiralling-out-of-control sister Debra.

Jennifer Carpenter as Debra Morgan

One of Dexter’s strengths as a series — and one of the reasons it experienced a ratings surge last season, despite some reviewers’ complaints that it has outstayed its welcome — is that, even though fans know who Dexter Morgan is and what he’s done, the series is still full of mystery, unpredictable and inscrutable.

Sunday’s season-opener is riveting television, both as a new chapter in a long, involving novel, and as a standalone mystery. Midway through the hour, when Dexter first meets Dr. Vogel, he looks terrified, as if he realizes the jig is up and he’s finally met his match.

C.S. Lee as Vince Masuka

If Dexter has taught anything in recent seasons, it’s to never assume that events will play out as one might expect. This time, though, could be different. The cumulative effect is strangely alluring. To see Dexter’s season opener is to be reminded of just how adult, intelligent and sophisticated this series once was and, in some ways, still is. (Sunday, The Movie Network, 9 ET; Movie Central, 9 MT, 8 PT).

•

The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s wildly uneven, oddly disorienting fictionalized drama of a 24-hour news channel that taps real-life news events for stories, returns in two weeks with a new season, but the same strange, off-putting tone.

Jeff Daniels

HBO is repeating the first season in sequence, as a primer for first-time viewers, perhaps, and to give returning viewers a more accurate fix on what The Newsroom is supposed to be, and trying to do.

Saturday’s episode, The Blackout, Part 2: Mock Debate, touches on the Casey Anthony trial — as George Stroumboulopoulos noted recently, while talking up his late-night CNN summer talk show, American cable-news channels have an inordinate obsession with salacious criminal court trials — and on the Republican primary debates for the U.S. presidency.

Jeff Daniels

The story revolves around a proposed GOP debate on The Newsroom’s liberal-leaning (fictional) news channel, and how the candidates’ handlers want to control the line of questioning before agreeing to terms.

The proposed debate ends predictably. Right and left are not going to see eye to eye, even in the best of circumstances, and this allows some of The Newsroom’s characters to sound off about how no one could have seriously expected the debate to happen in the first place.

Somewhere in all the speech-making is a commentary on the divide separating U.S. politics, and how the TV news audience deserves better than all-day coverage of maybe-murderer moms, and it’s food for thought, to a point.

The Newsroom

The Newsroom wants to be a romantic comedy, though, in addition to lampooning the 24-hour news channels, and it isn’t long before the love triangles, quadrangles and every-other-which-way angles get in the way of the story.

The Newsroom can be maddening to watch. The discerning viewer is constantly reminded of what it could have been — The West Wing, set in a national-news TV newsroom — only to be reminded of what it really is, a silly TV rom-com played out against a backdrop of real-life news events.

John Gallagher, Jr., left, and Emily Mortimer

It has its moments, though, especially on an otherwise threadbare Saturday, when there’s no hockey game and no drama beyond summer burn-off episodes of cancelled dramas Zero Hour and 666 Park Avenue.

The Newsroom may swerve uncertainly between comedy and drama, but at least it tries to be something more than the norm. It’s a little as (fictional) news producer MacKenzie (Mac) McHale (Emily Mortimer) says of noteworthy (fictional) news anchor and ex-boyfriend Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) in Saturday’s episode, by way of Sorkin: “You know what I like about Will? He’s not absolutely sure about anything. He struggles with things. He’s never certain he’s right, and sometimes he’s not, but he tries hard to be.” Back after this. (Saturday, HBO Canada, 7:30 ET/MT, 6:30 PT)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile